I Am My Most Important Boss, My Life Is My Job!

Editor’s note: For today we have a guest post by Andi Leeman who is a restless advocate of living life according to rules that we ourselves make. He works for himself, but what is more important is the fact he points out with this post, and that is that our life is in fact our most important job – and we are either to follow this notion and make smart choices and act accordingly upon the same ones, or pay a lot more time and focus on things that are temporary and not nearly that important.Enough of me, I leave you with Andi now.

The alarm sounds, it is still dark outside, the room is cold but you force yourself out of bed to get into the shower. Once showered you get dressed, make a coffee, get some breakfast and slowly the haze of sleep starts to be replaced with some form of alertness.

You leave your house, jump into your car or whatever means of transport you use each morning and then start the journey to work. Most mornings we rush around half asleep, probably eat only half of our breakfast and manage to get a couple of mouthfuls of coffee but we rush to be at work on time.

Should we make it in late we face the possibility of a disciplinary chat with the boss. Be late too many times and those chats could have our wages docked, or even lose us our job completely leaving us without any money at all. We do our best to make our working lives run as best as possible without confrontation or problems.

What I do find interesting is how we hand over our power to someone else; a third party can gain all of our respect and motivation. We intend to do right by this person who pays us a wage, we do our best to never let them down or upset them. We go along following a set of rules that makes us conform and motivates us to get stuff done.

However jobs and bosses come and go, these days they are rarely for life. What we earn and how we earn it can change in the blink of an eye. But ‘US’ and ‘OUR lives’ will be with us until we die. What we do everyday shapes our lives, every decision and moment in our lives takes us down different routes.

So why is it then, when it comes to ourselves we often overlook the really important stuff? Our lives, the stuff we do each day are ‘our real job’ and we ourselves are in fact the most important ‘boss’ we will ever know.

We decide for ourselves

We make decisions every second that can improve our lives or destroy it – gradually or even with a haste. We decide today how our weight and health will be like next week, we choose how much money we earn next year by the skills we learn or not learn today.

Why do we not get out of bed for ourselves but we do for ‘Mr Smith’ the works Manager? The benefits we would get for doing things for ourselves would greatly improve our lives far more than what we get when we do things for our works boss.

Some people pay good money to have a life coach or someone to take over the role of becoming our boss and motivate us to do stuff that we should do for ourselves anyway but don’t.

My friend and I used to joke about a friend who had a life coach and personal trainer… he would pay this guy to take him for a walk in the woods! Something we all can do for free.

Why do we treat ourselves worse than an animal treats the runt of the pack?

I believe it stems a lot from people not realizing that we are our own boss and it is up to us to make our jobs (lives) run as best as possible. Most people just bumble along in life unaware that they themselves are responsible for making things happen.

Success also means being ready to take responsibility

We want positive things to simply happen for us yet we know at our place of work that isn’t the case, for things to happen in our day jobs we need to do stuff. To earn a commission we need to ring potential clients. In our own lives, as an example, to lose weight we need to eat less and exercise more.

The majority of people would happily do the first because it avoids displeasing our boss, prevent us being seen as ‘not good’ and ‘worthless’ which could ultimately get us fired. We often do things to avoid confrontation and displeasing people or society. The idea that people would see us in a bad light is frightening to many.

Back to the example of losing weight, we only have ourselves to be accountable to and for most people it seems it is easier to sit back and become unhappy with our situation, to fall in to a mild depression and allow the cycle of misery to keep us following ‘the easy route’ instead of becoming our own boss, taking full control and doing what is needed to lose the weight.

Why is it easier to do things for others instead for ourselves?

If we ate better and did more exercise to build up strength and health we would ultimately feel better, have more energy, becoming mentally free and happier. But do we? No, but if Mr Smith, the manager required us to then we probably would.

Maybe we should see ourselves as a third person and hand over our power to that person. If some said we were lazy we would argue against them, we would often try and prove that person otherwise. ‘I will show them’ can often be a powerful motivator, maybe we should ‘show ourselves’ that we can do these things and make those changes we really want.

Not many of us want to spend the rest of our lives working at the same old place; in fact many of us probably do not want to work for someone else for the rest of our expected working life. We give at least 8 hours of our day to others to earn a few dollars; we rush around giving our time, respect and often best work to those jobs we do not really want.

Yet for ourselves, when we really want something that requires work and discipline with our time what do we do? We put it off until tomorrow, next week or next month. We decide that we cannot be bothered, we sit and watch the same old stuff on TV that we saw last week, we get lost in the lives of made up characters on soaps and pass up on our own lives and future development.

We decide what our life is going to look like via our actions

We wonder why our lives do not change or why things are not going right for us, we see ourselves as stuck in a rut unaware that the hell we are living is of our own making. We need to be mindful of our actions, our decisions and what we do with our time. We need to know what we want to achieve, what needs doing and see where we are putting most of our time, energy and attention.

Chances are, we will be spending most of our time and energy doing the things that take us away from our goals which maybe even take others like our bosses closer to theirs. It is time that we wake up and realize that we are our own bosses and our live is our jobs, one that we must work until we die. And as we know, a job requires work, discipline and intention to get the results asked for.

So now say to yourself out loud several times:I Am My Most Important Boss, My Life Is My Job!

This is a guest post by Andi Leeman who writes for TimsMinions.com covering all aspects of making money online & blogging as well as the challenges one would face with this line of work. He recently wrote a great article Getting Rid of The SM Syndrome which with interesting and amusing overture delves deeper into what prevents success – and personal development for that matter- from happening.

I am always surprised when a friend of mine complains about his job and then never does anything about it. We can all get into a rut in our working lives, but if YOU don’t decide to change things, then you can’t complain when nothing changes.

You are responsible for your own happiness, not anybody else. If you want to take control of your life, then you must take the steps to make an improvement.

Working for yourself is certainly one option that you can take. After all, if you are going to spend all day working, wouldn’t it be better to spend that time working on your own business. OK, so you may not have the safety net of having a guaranteed wage, but who better to work on providing a future than yourself.

Hi Matt, thank you for your comments, I didn’t meant to pick on the Smith name :-)

Yes we control our own destiny and happiness and it is strange how people spend a lot of time doing what they do not want to do but spend very little doing things that would help them achieve what they want to do in life.

Strange but true. I worked with loads of people who moaned about their jobs but never did anything about it. Moaning only does one thing, it cheeses people off to a point that they will avoid you. So as well as being stuck in a rut, you lose friends! Action is the key to change.

Great point Matt. That’s why I love what Andi said about we having the control. It IS really all up to us when you think about it. The choices we make today certainly affect the quality of life we are going to witness tomorrow, next month, next year.
The discrepancy between what we think is possible and what we are doing as to get there is huge, but when we think about it, it rests mainly on inaction and never starting with a damn thing. I don’t say we have to start a business tomorrow. I don’t say we have to start a business for that matter at all. But we can all learn how to do what we already do better, take a better care of our body, learn a new skill, a new language, read a new book… That’s why personal development has always appealed to me- it is never about now and doing one thing only i.e. we are constantly progressing, constantly learning.

Awesome post. The idea sounds so obvious after reading it, but it’s so true. We do everything we can to keep our bosses happy and bring more money into their pockets, but often do very little to improve our own lives. It’s really time to change our attitude towards ourselves. Thanks for sharing.

Hi Churchill, great to have you here and thanks for your comments, yes we do need to change our attitudes to ourselves, we want a great life and we love ourselves yet we spend most of our time doing things we hate and don’t enjoy, it is a very odd form of self love and care!
We worry about what others think of us more than what we think of ourselves. Time for a change.

That’s right Andi. People I know always complain about not having the like minded circles- their argument behind all of this is that 99% of the population function by following a different logic. Well here is your 1% right here- there are more and more progressive ideas being shared each and every day on the net, and more and more people gathering together as to make them happen- you just have to be willing to participate and start with some action. Once it creates momentum, no 99% out there would be able to stop you.

Psychologists will argue that it is a matter of motivation- “sharper sticks always motivate better than the sweetest carrot” to put it in layman terms. And albeit this makes sound logic, it is too big of a stake as to not “wake up”. Andi said it perfectly- our jobs may change tomorrow- and given the world we live in and knowing how volatile the job market gets year after year- they probably will. But our lives are with us for good; and we are either to progress or retrograde- for there is no status quo in nature.
Thanks for your comment Churchill, always glad seeing you here.

This was really good. I certainly remember those days of waking up in the early hours in a miserable state, and then rushing to work to do something I hate. They were rough times.

Your dead-on that our success is our responsibility. There is no “luck.” Everything happens through our own work. Every decision we make can be done consciously. On most occasions, we do things without thinking about it (watching hours of TV, eating unhealthy foods, etc.) But if we take responsibility for ourselves and acknowledge these decisions, we can change.

Ex. Deciding between a piece of cake and a smoothie. It’s these type of small conscious decisions that breed success. Once we can make those decisions, we become our own boss. Great post man.

Hi Kevin and thank you for your kind words. Yes every decision is down to us, I am certainly not perfect at making the right decision all of the time and sometimes I go with the bad one because now and then I just want to eat the cake :-) but I am conscious of the decisions I make and why.

It is amazing how many people are not, they talk as if they know but in reality they really do not realise that it is their actions that keep them in the state that they so want to leave. Deciding to eat unhealthy food and watch loads of TV which robs them of so much productive time in one way or another is no one else’s fault but there own.

Thank you for taking the time to stop and comment Kevin. Have a great day.